Identity (Identity)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Wednesday, September 09, 2009, 14:34 (5553 days ago) @ dhw
edited by unknown, Wednesday, September 09, 2009, 14:42

Matt believes that a man-made machine with consciousness will show that "the difference between us and everything else (in terms of consciousness) is only in degree. It means that consciousness should be relatively common in the universe."
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> I can't follow the connection with the rest of the universe. One has to bear in mind that our scientists already have a model to copy. If there is no creator or universal intelligence, Nature would either have to keep starting spontaneously from scratch on each planet, or life would have to travel spontaneously between planets and then evolve as it has done on Earth. How would the machine support either eventuality?
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> This provides an interesting link to your next observation: "It gives me more reason to doubt a creator, because I think the strongest arguments for a creator lie in the concepts of consciousness." I don't see how you can separate consciousness from life. Your Swiss professor says: "When we first switched it on it already started to display some interesting emergent properties." All he had to do was press the button, and the Schweizer Stromversorgungsgesellschaft (or whatever it's called ... I love those compound nouns) did the rest. We not only get switched on and display our emergent properties, but we also manage to reproduce, and to indulge in countless other amazing conscious and unconscious activities. I would therefore argue that the greater the complexity, the stronger the argument against chance, and consciousness is only one part of the equation. 
> -I think it could be safely said that to me, the strongest arguments for a creator lie in those problems that really are intractable; consciousness for one. If we can create consciousness from inert matter (a computer), it does a couple things. First it lowers the bar on what we consider life. Maybe Gaia really does exist? And it therefore means that it is less likely that we humans are a one-off anomaly in the history of space and time. (Because of said lowered bar.) -
> To sum up, I'd say that a man-made, self-aware machine will only prove that consciousness does not require more than the materials of the brain, but that won't tell us anything about (a) there being life or consciousness elsewhere in the universe, (b) how the materials got put together in the first place, and hence (c) the odds for and against there being a creator. But that doesn't make the experiment any the less exciting! 
> -Answer to (a): if we can create consciousness from inert matter, it serves as positive proof that consciousness can be made from other materials. The lower bar means we *should* be more likely to find it.-(b): I've got nothing here. I think I admitted as much, but if I didn't I do here. We're no closer to solving the origins problem.-(c): Agreed. I wasn't trying to make that argument, but I can see where it can be inferred. It'll prove that intelligent beings can make intelligent beings. Perhaps in this case it serves as a better argument for David. -> In your latest post to David you comment: "It can't be said you understand something without being able to build a working model of it." (I hope you don't mean my doctor should be able to build a working model of my body!) This echoes the comment in an article recommended by George and quoted by me under "Abiogenesis" on 5 September at 11.50: "The dream of physicists is to create elementary life," Libchaber says. "Then we would know that we understand something." As you so rightly pointed out in an earlier post, the work hasn't been done yet, which means that so far we are not in a position to understand, let alone explain, consciousness or the origin of life. Until we are, I will join you in "not arguing for materialism or immaterialism". 
> -David has flatly stated on one occasion that what he did as a doctor was make it easier for the body to do its work. We're just now becoming capable of harnessing the power of stem cells--the "force" needed for the body to do its work, and only in the past 2 years have we discovered that the human appendix isn't useless. And in a recent post to David I also mention that we're just now becoming capable of studying the massive networks of biochemical reactions in a single cell. I rest my case... the human body still has enough secrets that we can't say that we *know* it. -> Quick French lesson: "une de mes raisons d'être" would have kept you out of trouble with your wife. Meanwhile, good luck with your Chinese. You'll be pleased to hear that I can't go beyond the parameters of the take-away.-As much as I love my subject, I've been finding school getting in the way of really getting to know a variety of people from different cultures. I live in the midwest, where in my observation we are very culturally homogeneous. Omaha itself is such a segregated city that we're studied by sociologists far and wide. I've made some resolutions about this but I *must* finish school first. Learning Mandarin is step 1. Then probably Spanish. I've had a long-time goal of being trilingual, but life is too short not to keep jumping in.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"